MAY 30, 2001
MINORITY VIEW
"They Go With John Jones, Caucasian Male" | Harvard Business School Professor David Thomas talks about race, corporate culture, and the obstacles minority managers still face
| David A. Thomas has devoted much of his academic career to examining race in the workplace. A professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, he's the author of numerous papers looking at diversity and its impact on everything from organizational behavior to professional relationships.
His book, Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America, written with John J. Gabarro and published in 1999, is one of the few detailed examinations of minority executives. It grew out of Thomas' research at three large corporations, where he traced the career paths of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians who had made it to the executive suite.
In an article published recently in the Harvard Business Review, Thomas reexamined the 1999 study to extract lessons about appropriate mentoring of minority managers and professionals.
Thomas writes that the career paths of white and minority executives are considerably different. In his research, he says, he found that white executives typically are singled out early in their careers as rising stars and placed on a fast track to middle- and upper-management, and beyond. By contrast, minorities take significantly longer to reach middle management.
"In the tournament for whites, contenders are sorted early on, and only those deemed most promising proceed to further competition," he writes. "In the tournament for minorities, the screening process for the best jobs occurs much later."
Thomas found a number of differences between minorities who made it to the top and those who remained stuck in middle management. One of the key ones, he writes, is the quality of mentoring they received. The "plateaued" managers had worked with mentors who taught them skills. Those who became executives worked with mentors who not only instructed them, but gave them career counseling and helped them make the right personal connections in the corporation. The mentors also were willing to acknowledge that race might be a barrier to advancement, to discuss racial issues openly with their proteges, and to help them clear career hurdles.
Recently, BusinessWeek Online writer Pamela Mendels chatted with Thomas about race and its impact on an individual's climb to the top. What follows are edited excerpts of that conversation.
Q: What's the reason for the difference in the career paths of white executives and minority executives?
A: We think it takes longer for people to become comfortable with the performance of minorities. A fair amount of social-science research shows that minorities are much more likely to have their successes attributed to external factors, such as luck or a good manager, than to internal factors: "This person is naturally talented, motivated, smart." Same stellar performance. Two years into the job. White? You get labeled as someone with natural talent and leadership ability. A person of color? You get labeled as "someone to watch."
Q: So minorities have to prove themselves in a way that whites don't?
A: Right. I think the best way that you can say it is: Minorities have to be stellar longer to get the same pay-out. It's not to say that the white executives that we looked at weren't also stellar in their early careers, when they got labeled as fast-trackers. But that same evidence [of outstanding performance] for minorities didn't get translated into their being put on this fast track.
Q: How do your findings square with the perception of some whites that minorities sometimes get further faster without having to deliver the same level of performance as their white peers?
A: I think that's a distorted view. [One] thing that contributes to it is that [once the high-performing minority employee gets put on the fast track], average-performing whites might look and say "Gee, here's this African American who was moving just like I was. Neither one of us appeared to be on the fast track. Now, all of the sudden he's zooming and I'm still moving at this modest pace." In the white person's mind, average-performing people of color have been advantaged over average-performing whites. Our data suggest that, from the very beginning, minorities who ultimately find themselves on the fast track gave above-average performance. They just weren't being rewarded like whites whose performance was above average.
Q: How much overt discrimination do you think remains in American workplaces?
A: It's more about expectations. It manifests itself in a couple of ways. One is, if I don't expect that you will be stellar, then when I see stellar performance from you, I doubt it. When the manager goes to white colleagues and says, "I have Jane Doe, African American woman, she is great!" the colleagues are much more likely to ask for more evidence to convince them that that's the case, because they don't expect it. They go with John Jones, Caucasian male, and they say: "I've seen that before." They give him the opportunity.
Q: Some people argue that the need for affirmative action in the workplace has passed. What do you think?
A: I think that's wrong. When affirmative action is done well, it can provide two things [to the corporation]. It can help an organization question whether it's setting higher standards for the admission of one group than another.
Affirmative action can [also] force people to look for [job candidates] who may not necessarily come up in their informal networks. Most jobs, in particular jobs that lead to greater economic opportunity and executive responsibility, don't come through advertisements. They come through networks, and minorities are less likely to be in these networks. So, I think the effort to undo affirmative action doesn't hold up. And it's interesting that most major corporations understand this, and have not gone after affirmative action. Most CEOs will tell you that affirmative action has done their corporations more good than bad.
Q: In many corporations, diversity training programs have become popular. Are they effective in minimizing discrimination in the workplace?
A: There are different genres of diversity training. The most common is cultural sensitivity training. It can help people relate better to each other in the workplace, but it tends not to help managers be more effective in managing a diverse workforce.
[A more effective] diversity training program originates from an assessment of the conditions in the organization that may create unfair advantages or disadvantages. It looks at the culture of the organization and how it manages people, its assumptions about development, and how it then either facilitates or inhibits the negative dynamics around diversity in the organization.
Q: Are there any career moves that you would advise minority employees who would like to be executives to avoid?
A: One is moving into a staff role too early in your career, on the assumption that you can move to the core business or the line organization. The other is staying too long in the same middle-management functional area. Depth early in your career is what's most important. Then, as you reach middle management and move to senior management, breadth. Many people get to middle management and become very good at something. The organization rewards them for it, but they're not being broadened in the way that executives need to broaden.
Another piece of advice is: Very early on, build a diverse network of people who support you in your career development [and] provide you information and advice related to your job and your career. The group should be diverse -- your peers, your seniors, and, in today's environment, people who are junior to you, who may be much more in touch with the latest developments in the field. The network [should be] diverse in its cultural and racial composition. We found that minority executives had diversity in both of those dimensions. Minorities who plateaued in middle management frequently had networks that were either all white or all other minorities, or networks that depended totally on people who were senior to them, or peers.
Q: What advice could you give corporations interested in promoting diversity, especially in the executive suites?
A: Corporations can do their own version of the study we did, to find out what the flow of people through their pipeline looks like. Where are people getting stuck? Or, if people are making it to the top, are they moving in a different pattern? [Then companies can ask:] What might that tell us about our organization and our vulnerabilities, so that we can develop approaches that go to where the blockages are?
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Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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